A Cysteine Protease Is Critical for Babesia spp. Transmission in Haemaphysalis Ticks

Vector ticks possess a unique system that enables them to digest large amounts of host blood and to transmit various animal and human pathogens, suggesting the existence of evolutionally acquired proteolytic mechanisms. We report here the molecular and reverse genetic characterization of a multifunctional cysteine protease, longipain, from the babesial parasite vector tick Haemaphysalis longicornis. Longipain shares structural similarity with papain-family cysteine proteases obtained from invertebrates and vertebrates. Endogenous longipain was mainly expressed in the midgut epithelium and was specifically localized at lysosomal vacuoles and possibly released into the lumen. Its expression was up-regulated by host blood feeding. Enzymatic functional assays using in vitro and in vivo substrates revealed that longipain hydrolysis occurs over a broad range of pH and temperature. Haemoparasiticidal assays showed that longipain dose-dependently killed tick-borne Babesia parasites, and its babesiacidal effect occurred via specific adherence to the parasite membranes. Disruption of endogenous longipain by RNA interference revealed that longipain is involved in the digestion of the host blood meal. In addition, the knockdown ticks contained an increased number of parasites, suggesting that longipain exerts a killing effect against the midgut-stage Babesia parasites in ticks. Our results suggest that longipain is essential for tick survival, and may have a role in controlling the transmission of tick-transmittable Babesia parasites

Humanity's Last Exam

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90\% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. HLE consists of 3,000 questions across dozens of subjects, including mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. HLE is developed globally by subject-matter experts and consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions suitable for automated grading. Each question has a known solution that is unambiguous and easily verifiable, but cannot be quickly answered via internet retrieval. State-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate low accuracy and calibration on HLE, highlighting a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the expert human frontier on closed-ended academic questions. To inform research and policymaking upon a clear understanding of model capabilities, we publicly release HLE at https://lastexam.ai

Improved 63Ni radiochemical assay of free fatty acids in plasma.

Abstract We have modified the 63Ni radiochemical method of Ho (Anal Biochem 1970;36:105) for determination of free fatty acids (FFA) in plasma. Extracting 1 or 0.1 mL of plasma with Dole's mixture (J Biol Chem 1960;235:2595) and washing the "heptane" layer with two volumes of isopropanol/water/dilute (0.5 mol/L) H2SO4 (25/25/1, by vol) removes about 90% of the lipid phosphorus from the "heptane" layer without removing any FFA and is more convenient than treatment with silicic acid. The following modifications decrease background radioactivity and improve separation of the organic phase from the water phase containing the uncomplexed 63Ni: (a) use glassware instead of plastic test tubes; (b) evaporate the organic phase to dryness before adding the 63Ni (this removes the isopropanol, which interferes with the 63Ni assay); and (c) add anhydrous sodium sulfate before the final centrifugation step.</jats:p